Repeat the Days
by regenerate
Summary: c.c. isn't a fortune-teller, but she doesn't need to be to know this ending.


**repeat the days**

C.C. knows.

She glances at the small boy who wanders after his younger sister and she sees things lining up in her mind like they have for centuries and centuries over.  
She knows the same old story yet somehow she lets it keep repeating.  
Maybe she's just bored. (_Or maybe she just hopes things will be better this time.)  
_

She never gets full of pizza, and just like that neither is her heart ever satisfied.

"Lovely children, aren't they?" Marianne chuckles, smoothing her skirts and gazing at them, perfect pedigree princes and princesses with smiling violet eyes and innocence still instilled in them,  
as instilled as fresh spring grass will be within the earth before winter comes and freezes it away.

Nothing is permanent, C.C. knows.

Except her.

It's with this thought in mind that C.C. vanishes from Aries Villa, away from a woman whose smile is buried beneath a child's body full of bullet holes and the birth of something dark and brilliant stirring from an older brother's rage.

Another thing C.C. knows:  
Time doesn't heal anything.  
--It only takes something else away.

When she was still young, new and betrayed, she would often pause and stop at wars, at death, at suffering, horror and pity and sorrow mingled in.  
Now? (Saw cities burning, Empires crumbling, revolutions start at the birth of a new year and repeat themselves a hundred years after that. Saw man turn on a child, starving, sick and poor, now there staring at bodies piled high, Japan's rich scent coated with blood and cherry blossoms all heralding the beginnings of another human's plan, another twisted perception of salvation in the form of no lies)

She doesn't stop anymore.

Again.  
Start it up.  
Take this power,  
accept it,

_** lose yourself.**_

You're great, you're god, you're a king, you don't fulfill contracts.  
Betray me, abandon me, beat me, love me, it's all fake.  
Watch the time, human life stops short, clock ticks.

Die, another who failed to save, another who failed to survive.

Maybe it will be different this time—

_Again. _

_______

A truth. Snow is not pure.

If snowflakes were memories than C.C. would be that much more. It's not beautiful, it's cold and it covers everything in simplicity and when it melts it leaves nothing behind.  
Snow isn't pure.

It's just empty.

(Maybe this is why she wears white, because just like that today and tomorrow and yesterday will all dissolve inside of her, and she'll forget what it ever was.)

Which is why when he tells her that it's beautiful she can't understand it and she can't forget it.

___

A fact. Lelouch is still a boy.

She often sits at night, listening to the ragged pentameter of his breathing, the rise and fall of his chest and the way every single thing he hides behind the mask heaves out with his breath. She feels him choke apologies while feverishly whispering their names, over and over.

Mother. Nunnally. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

C.C. touches him because he's disturbing her sleep, not because there is something so nostalgic at watching this again, as if she is not stuck in the flow but instead moving backwards.

___

And the most important thing:

C.C. is not a fortune-teller.

...But that doesn't mean she doesn't need to see the future to know the ending.

"This is a contract, from me to you."

And just like that, the cycle begins again, with a hand, a touch, a word, and she is suddenly pulled back into that hope that she will be saved somehow.  
Somewhere in his eyes she sees a tenderness that is growing, and in time will grow only for her.

Lelouch holds out his hand.

(And though she already knew the ending)

C.C. knows the ending. She sees it, a man rising to greatness, fading away with his brilliance and laughing when all he wants is to cry.  
She sees cities crumbling, thousands bowing at his name and a world is turned in fire.

She sees a witch and a King in white, because there is an inexplicable part of them about to dissolve.

And even if taking this hand was repeating fate—

She watches him walk solemn and alone, to his end, an end that will bring a new world of peace at the cost of his soul--and for the first time in centuries there is something stirring from her chest, enough to cry tears, enough to mourn over—enough to leave a deep sweetening wound--

...C.C. took it anyway.


End file.
